The reason is: jobs represent a lower and lower proportion of hardware production. And hardware represents less and less of the value-added in a product.There are profound implications in that statement.

Let me give you a few examples of where the jobs dilemma really lies. A couple of months ago Malcolm Frank of Cognizant told me his company had 100 recruiters out on the road in the U.S. but they had difficulties finding the people they needed: people with a mix of business and IT talent who could talk strategy to clients and prospects.

Here are two further examples that underline the fact that the jobs problem is partly a talent problem that no educational institution has a handle on.

The first interviewee is the CIO of a major media organization. The biggest problem he faces? He needs people who are capable of reskilling on a weekly basis, should Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google make any changes to their platforms, or if a new social marketing product come onto the market, or if the company sees an opportunity for a new app to differentiate its offering.

Those people are very hard to find even though his company has an interesting brand -- not quite Facebook or Google, but close.

The second comes from the auto industry where, my interviewee told me, the balance between software and hardware engineers on any given infotainment project is now 50 software engineers to one hardware engineer. The difference between before and after is huge. Hardware engineers used to dominate these projects. So hardware does not create jobs like it used to, nowhere near.

The jobs growth continues to be in software. And the competition for software talent is global. Every company I have interviewed so far has offshored software jobs, seeking to find the best talent, wherever it might be. As far as I can see nothing is being done at a policy level to address that drain.

It's hard to disagree -- with over $100 billion in the bank Apple could do more for America. But the reality of today's economy is that the knowledge-intense roles that we've said for a decade would become critical, the ones often centering on software, are indeed critical.

The absence of global supply is holding companies back. And so too is the lack of experience in this fast changing environment. The necessary problem-solving skills are difficult to teach, and the experience is often impossible to acquire because so much is new.

But these are still solvable requirements: make the labor market more fluid, allow people to expose their skills development more publicly, teach people to package their business experience better, make people better developers of their own narrative, better managers of their core problem solving skills rather than their exact implementation skills, accept we are constantly in beta mode, and teach people, quickly, to function in conditions of unprecedented uncertainty. Tough though it might sound that would tee people up for jobs that are already out there and still being offshored.